Customer-valued
prioritization is
concerned with working on the items that yield the highest value to the
customer as soon as possible. This technique aims to engage the customer in the
prioritization process, in which the team identifies high-value features and
moves them up the backlog of items to work on.

The use of
customer-valued prioritization schemes is a common across all agile methods.
While the terminology varies e.g. In Scrum, its called a“Product Backlog,” FDD has a “feature list,” and DSDM has a “prioritized
requirements list”. The project works through a prioritized list of items that
have certain customer value.

The prioritization
schemes used vary from method to method and sometimes project to project based
on what works for the customer. One of the simplest schemes is to prioritize
items as “Priority 1,” “Priority 2,” “Priority 3,” etc. While this approach is straightforward,
it can be problematic in that people have a tendency to designate everything a “Priority 1.” If too many items are
labelled “Priority 1,” the
prioritizing becomes ineffective. For the same reasons, “high”, “medium,” and “low” prioritizations can also be problematic.